Spy agency wants video game to teach spooks to think straight

A US intelligence agency wants analysts to start playing video games in order …

American intelligence analysts are biased, and therefore make lousy decisions; even the spooky agencies admit that. The spy guys’ new hope for introducing some objectivity: get the analysts to start playing a video game.

“A Serious Game could provide an effective mechanism for exposing and mitigating cognitive bias,” the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency (IARPA) announced on Tuesday. IARPA, the blue-sky science and technology division of the intelligence community, is looking to gather potential developers for this “Sirius” initiative next month in Washington.

“When an intelligence problem invokes [analysts'] biases, analysts may draw inferences or adopt beliefs that are logically unsound or not supported by evidence,” IARPA notes. “Cognitive biases in analysis tend to increase with the level of uncertainty, lead to systematic errors, filter perceptions, shape assumptions and constrain alternatives.”

Sirius is one of a whole bunch of IARPA efforts to overcome biases—and reach more accurate conclusions. In December, 2009 IARPA started work on a computer system that could replicate—and then outdo—human decision-making; a few months later, the agency launched a project to let algorithms pick the most objective analysts.

With the Sirius project, IARPA is hoping gamers will be able to study—and unlearn—all sorts of different prejudices. The agency is looking to axe everything from “Anchoring Bias” (relying too much on a single piece of evidence) to “Confirmation Bias” (only accepting facts that back up your pre-made case) “Fundamental Attribution Error” (attributing too much in an incident to personality, instead of circumstance).

IARPA is hoping that “social scientists, computer scientists, statisticians, and gaming and virtual world experts, as [well as] universities and companies from around the world will participate in this research.” Given the, um, uneven state of journalism these days, let’s hope they let a few reporters in on the fun, too.